


Better Now Than How It Used to Be

by Sena



Category: Bandom, Danger Days: The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys (Album), My Chemical Romance
Genre: Alternate Universe - Killjoys, Canonical Character Death, Drug Use, First Love, First Meetings, M/M, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-07
Updated: 2013-06-07
Packaged: 2017-12-14 06:27:51
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,444
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/833780
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sena/pseuds/Sena
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Kobra's life is mostly stimulants and science projects -- radios and water filtration systems being the two most important.  He's got his projects and his pills, has his brother and the woman whose bed his brother warms, and that's more than enough for him.  He doesn't even notice the way he makes room for Fun Ghoul until it's done, until there's a spot just for him that would be cold and empty if Ghoul ever walked away.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Better Now Than How It Used to Be

**Author's Note:**

> I started this in March of 2012 with the idea it would be done in a month. That didn't happen. In the spring of 2013 I thought, "Man, I should hurry up and get that finished before the comic comes out and totally Josses my backstory." That didn't happen, either. *hands*

The first time Kobra sees Fun Ghoul, he's running hot up in the stratosphere. He's got copper wire and a cardboard box and he's winding, winding, winding, so fucking focused on every loop and every turn. He's been running on Xojos for days, now, nearly finished, and they're going to be able to pick up every damn transmission in the zones.

Xojos give him energy, sure, but what they really do is focus his attention razor sharp, so it takes him a minute to realize that the background noise is some sort of big commotion.

He looks up from the table he's been bent over for hours and there are people Kobra's never seen before crowded together in the front of the station, and then there's Sweet Assault's yelling at them to, "Give me some goddamn light and room to work, you worthless fucking brats. Kobra, for fuck's sake, get me my fucking kit."

He says, "On it," and he's there, zooming around the counter and snagging her medical bag, giggling a little bit as he zooms back around. It's like the earth's coming at him extra fast, and it's awesome. He pushes through the zonerunners he doesn't know, and there on the floor of the diner is a kid his age, and he's all fucked up. "He looks pretty fucked up, Sweets," he says.

"No shit," she drawls, peeling back a corner of the cloth she's got pressed to the wound in the kid's chest. She winces, then shouts, "I swear to fuck if you pieces of shit don't get out of my diner and let me work, I'll let this little shithead die and shoot every one of you in the goddamn balls."

"Best listen to the lady," Party drawls from somewhere off to Kobra's left, and he doesn't even have to look to know exactly what Party looks like. He's standing in the doorway, silhouetted by the sun, hand resting casually on the zapper strapped to his hip. He looks cool and sexy and dangerous, Kobra knows, and the strangers all haul ass out of the diner and Kobra giggles because as soon as Party sees how bad the kid is messed up, he's going to turn green.

"Aw, shit," Party says, and Kobra can see him turning away out of the corner of his eye. "We eat in here."

"Fuck you," says the kid breathlessly. "You think I want to be fucking bleeding out on your goddamn dirty floor?" And then he makes a sound that's barely even human, all pain and fear like a hurt animal.

Kobra holds the cloth tight against the kid's chest as Sweet Assault washes up, then he does the same as she peels off the shreds of the kid's shirt and assesses the damage. She says, "Hold him down for me, Kid."

Kobra holds him down and the kid thrashes and screams as Sweets cuts apart and digs around in his flesh for shrapnel, screams and sobs and pisses himself and finally passes out from the pain after five or six minutes. It's easier after that, easier to do everything Sweets tells him to do without also having to worry about the way the kid's sobs had cut into his bones.

"How hot you running right now?" Sweets asks softly, not looking up from whatever it is she's doing to the kid's insides. Kobra understands the outsides of people, knows how to make skin match up with skin, but the insides are just a mystery of blood and unidentifiable lumps.

"Pretty hot," Kobra admits. "Like, uh, up in the mesosphere."

"You gonna overheat on me?"

"No," he says. "No, I'm good. I'm good right now. Really focused."

"Okay. You irrigate and stitch up this cut right here on his arm. Soon as you're done, you move on to the next. I'll let you know if I need an extra pair of hands over here."

Kobra nods and starts irrigating and stitching. He does the best he can even though he's pretty sure the kid's already a ghost. If the blood loss doesn't kill him, the shock of getting stitched up might, and if that doesn't kill him, there are critters that grow in wounds and suck your life right out no matter how good the doctoring is.

Once they're done stitching the kid up, Kobra helps Sweets strip the kid's clothes off and wipe him down. They bundle him into a cot on the far side of the diner, thick curtains keeping it dark and cool. Then there's nothing to do but wait.

Sweet Assault goes back to assembling the water filter Kobra'd designed for her and he almost goes back to the copper wire antenna, but he doesn't want to be in the same room anymore. He doesn't want to look over and see the kid's pale pink mouth or his shock of black hair or the way the bandages don't cover the bar code tattooed over the kid's heart.

"Is he dead?" Party asks softly as Kobra steps outside into the sun. He's leaning against the shell of a Trans Am that somebody'd stripped for parts long before Sweet Assault had taken the station for her own.

Kobra shakes his head and says, "Not yet." He slumps against the side of the Trans Am and closes his eyes, tips his face up to the sun.

"You're covered in blood."

Kobra looks down at himself. He's spattered with it from his shoulders to his knees and it's starting to dry into a crust on his knuckles. He squats down and scoops up a handful of sand, rubs it up and down one arm, then does the same thing for the other. Finally when he stands and brushes his hands off, there's nothing left on his skin but dust. His clothes will be harder to clean; he's probably better off just getting rid of them.

He's starting to feel an ache in his back, just on either side of his shoulder blades, and gravity feels stronger than it used to. He digs in his pocket, then looks over at Party when he comes up empty.

"You need to sleep," Party tells him.

"I slept last night."

"No, you didn't. And you haven't been eating."

Kobra says, "I'm not a little kid."

"I didn't say you were. But you haven't slept in days, and downing a handful of pills doesn't count as eating. So drop out of orbit for a while and when you come to tomorrow, I'll give them back."

Kobra would argue, but with the pills fading fast he feels the beginnings of hunger gnawing at his belly, feels like his arms and legs are filled with lead. He heads over to the garage where he and Party sleep and manages to eat nearly half a can of Power Pup before he's too exhausted to even lift his fork to his mouth. Then he just crashes down and dreams.

Party's there when Kobra finally comes to. His muscles ache like he's been running for days, but other than that he's fine. He turns slowly onto his side and watches as Party feeds Baby Girl little bites of apple. He has no idea where Party had found real fruit, but it doesn't surprise him to see Party giving it away to a toddler who doesn't even know she's getting something rare.

When Baby Girl sees that Kobra's awake, she smiles and hurries over to him. She says, "Apple?" and takes a piece of it right out of her own mouth and puts it into his.

He laughs and chews it and says, "Mmm, thanks Baby Girl," even though it's sort of gross. He digs through his clothes to see if he has a good replacement for the bloody ones. He has a shirt that will do fine, but the bloody jeans are his best pair. He scours them with sand and they're still stained when he's done, but they're no longer stiff with it. He's just pulling them back on when Sweet Assault leans against the wall and says, "I don't suppose either one of you is holding any Pax you're willing to give to the kid."

"No," Party says, shaking his head. "I think we've got Clementines, though. Were those Clementines we got from Vampire Brat?"

"Probably Dulces," Kobra tells him. "Maybe Placidas, but they didn't feel like Clementines. We've got Beatitudes. They won't put him totally out, but he won't be feeling any pain."

Baby Girl shuffles over to Sweet Assault and says, "Mama, apple?" Kobra notices that the piece she offers her mother hasn't been pre-chewed.

Sweet Assault squats down and strokes Baby Girl's hair. "Where'd you get apples from, sweetheart?" she asks softly. She looks over at Party. "You got her fruit."

"She's a growing girl," Party says, tipping his head down, then looking up at Sweet Assault through his long bangs. Kobra knows exactly what that fucking look means. "I got some for you, too."

"And on that note," Kobra says, swooping Baby Girl up into his arms and making her giggle, "you and I are going to go pump that kid full of pills while Mama and Party Poison have their private grownup time."

When he gets to the station, he puts Baby Girl in one of the booths, but she just slides down onto the dirty floor as soon as he lets go. Sweet Assault has already covered the worst of the blood with sand, and Kobra toes at it, then leaves it be when he sees it's still wet. He'll sweep it out once it's dry.

"Stay away from the sand right here, Baby Girl," he tells her.

"Why?"

"Because there's blood under it."

"Why?"

"Because a kid came in earlier who was bleeding."

"Why?"

"Because your mama's the best sawbones in a hundred miles."

"Why?"

"I don't know, sweetheart, she just is." Kobra Kid's pretty sure Sweet Assault's had real training, that she was a real doctor once up on a time, but he's never asked. Nobody asks about the life you lead before you ended up in the zones, and very few people bother to offer that sort of information on their own.

He hears a soft moan from the corner, letting him know the kid hasn't ghosted, yet. He pulls one of the curtains back and says, "Hey. You hungry? Thirsty?"

"No. Did any of my friends stay?"

Kobra shakes his head. "Sweets kicked them out so she could have room to work on you and then they all took off back into the dust once you started screaming."

The kid doesn't look surprised. He says, "My name's Fun Ghoul. When I ghost will you get a message to somebody for me?"

Kobra says, "You're not going to ghost," even though he's pretty sure it's a lie.

Fun Ghoul ignores him. "Just let Slaughter Pop know what happened to me, okay? He lives out in the wastes, on the far side of Boneyard Rock. Just tell him how I got ghosted since I'm pretty sure he's the only one who gives a shit."

"What do you want me to tell him?" Kobra asks. He sits on the stool next to the cot since the kid's voice is pretty weak.

"The truth. I was out joyriding with the Twenty-Fours. There was a caravan on Route 83 and they decided they wanted to take whatever was valuable. They just looked like families, maybe, people trying to get as far away from Bat City as they could. I tried to get out of the car because it was fucking stupid, stealing from families, but all that meant was that I was the first one anybody in the caravan could get a clean shot at."

"They shot first?" Kobra asks him.

Fun Ghoul nods.

"Probably smugglers."

"Yeah. Or just regular runners who were smart enough to know what was coming. At least those assholes didn't just leave me to die in the desert." He takes a shaky breath and winces. There's sweat across his brow and he smells wrong, sick, like the critters have already started infesting him.

"I've got a couple of Beatitudes," Kobra says.

The kid takes another shaking breath. "I don't have anything to trade, but please. Please, I need--" his voice breaks and he moans soft and high pitched.

Kobra says, "We can work out a deal once you're better."

"I'm going to fucking ghost."

"Then you'll just have to fucking owe me in the afterlife." He puts the pills on Fun Ghoul's tongue and helps him lift his head up so he can wash them down with flat beer. It's disgusting, but it's cleaner than the water until they can put Kobra's filtration system to work.

It doesn't take long before the Beatitudes kick in and Fun Ghoul's expression is glazed, pupils blown so wide Kobra can't see the color of his eyes. He peels back the bandages to look at the kid's wounds and most of them are okay, but the one on his chest is starting to fester.

"You stay here, Baby," he tells her. She looks up from the doll Party had made her from colorful rags and yarn and hugs it to her chest. "I'll be right back, okay?" She just rocks her baby and ignores him.

The flies are the worst part, he thinks. He wouldn't mind it at all if he didn't have to listen to that sound, didn't have to bat them away from his face and try to keep them out of his nose and ears. He squats down next to the garbage heap and uses a twisted piece of metal to push through it until he finds what he wants. He scoops maggots into an old Power Pup can, then heads back inside. Baby Girl's still playing with her doll and the kid's still soaring high in the stratosphere.

"This might seem weird," Kobra tells him softly. "But it won't hurt, okay? You're practically interstellar right now, aren't you?"

Fun Ghoul smiles at him, lopsided and hazy. "Fucking interstellar," he slurs, eyes falling shut. He's not completely out, but he's drifting and unaware of what's happening, which Kobra thinks is probably good. He puts the maggots over the infection growing in Fun Ghoul's chest, then covers it loosely so the kid won't see them and freak out the next time he comes back to earth.

He's reading to Baby Girl from one of the books Sweet Assault collects obsessively, something about a bird who wants to drive a bus, when Sweets comes back to check on the kid. Her dark skin is flushed and he can see sweat on the back of her neck where her hair's pulled up.

Kobra hasn't been with anyone since they still lived in Battery City, since they used to sneak into the underground and Party would talk art and revolution and Kobra would pop Alegrias or Dulces and revel in the novelty of actually _feeling_. He never learned any of their names because nobody used names in the underground, and he hadn't been Kobra Kid then, anyway. The memories of touch belong to someone whose name he can barely remember.

"You did good work," Sweets says, coming over to sit on a stool near the booth where Kobra's got Baby Girl on his lap.

Baby Girl turns the page before Kobra's finished reading it, but he doesn't mind. "You think he's going to make it?"

Sweets shrugs and lights a cigarette. She sighs happily on the exhale, and Kobra smirks at her. She flips him off and grins. "It was good of you to dose him up the way you did."

Kobra shrugs and looks back down at the book. Sometimes being good to somebody is all you've got to prove you're alive. Sweet Assault had been good to him and Party, had given them a place to stay even before she knew Kobra understood electronics, even before she and Party started looking at each other. She could have just ghosted them both. She could have just turned her back and let the zones ghost them for her instead of offering the garage for them to sleep in, instead of sharing her food.

When Baby Girl climbs down off Kobra's lap, Sweets tosses him a bottle of pills--the Xojos that Party had taken from him earlier. Kobra downs one and goes back to his antenna, and it's functional and pulling in a station from the south before he looks up and sees that it's gone all the way through night and into day again.

He's made six more antennas and rewired an old Kaito solar model before it's time for him and Party to head to the market. It's on the far side of the old whiskey distillery this time, and Kobra doesn't even have to hawk his work, has people who actually seek him out for trade. Kobra asks if anybody's got anti-critters, but nobody's holding.

"Everything okay out at the diner?" asks Dr. Death Defying, one of Kobra's best customers. "It's not the kid, is it?"

Kobra shakes his head and doesn't say anything about Fun Ghoul. "It would just be nice to have, you know, what with everybody who shows up needing Sweets' help."

He doesn't get any anti-crits, but he does end up with a bottle full of Pax for one of his antennas and a promise of more if Kobra can boost Dr. Death Defying's radio signal, which he's sure he can.

They come back loaded down with food and ammunition, a pristine vacuum relay for Kobra, boots that Baby Girl can grow into along with a tiny boot knife that straps on the outside. They've got filters for their masks and a bright yellow refillable lighter with a flowered, grinning skull on it.

While Party and Sweet Assault go through the supplies and Baby Girl naps on a blanket near the bar, Kobra slips through the curtains to check up on Fun Ghoul. The maggots had done their work and eaten the infection days earlier, but Kobra still wants to make sure he's healing up right.

"Hey," Fun Ghoul says softly, head lolling to one side. "Hey, Kobra Kid, hey, hi, hello."

Kobra can't help the grin that appears on his face. "You're fucked up," he says.

"Mmm," Fun Ghoul agrees with a nod. "Out of fucking orbit, baby. Pow, past the fucking moon." He giggles and his eyes fall closed and only then does Kobra see the new bandage on his chest, soaked with blood.

"Leave it," Sweets says softly from behind him, and his hand stills at the edge of the bandage.

"What did you do?" Kobra asks softly.

"Got rid of that tattoo over his heart."

"What was it?"

"A barcode."

"I know, but what did it mean?"

Sweet Assault brushes Fun Ghoul's hair off his forehead. She touches him in the same maternal way she touches Kobra and Baby Girl. She says, "It didn't mean anything. It was just a tattoo."

+++

The water filtration system works. It's simple, mostly sand and charcoal, but that's good. The charcoal isn't hard to get and they've got more sand than they know what to do with. Party Poison convinces him to give out the design details for free.

"You fucking kidding me?" Fun Ghoul asks weakly. He can get up and walk around, but he still tires easily. He's sprawled in one of the booths. "Do you know how fucking much something like this is worth? And you want to give it away?"

Party says, "We're giving it away because we know exactly how much it's worth. Because charging for clean water is something BLI would do."

Fun Ghoul winces and looks away. He stays silent most of the day but he does come over and sit next to Kobra as he reads to Baby Girl.

When Baby Girl gets bored with it and takes her doll over to Sweets, Ghoul reaches out and touches one of the pages. He runs his fingers over the words, but Kobra sees how his eyes don't track them at all.

"Can you read?" Kobra asks softly.

Fun Ghoul shakes his head.

"Do you want to learn?"

There's a spark of something in Ghoul's eyes, but he shakes his head again. He says, "Why bother?"

Kobra says, "What else do you have to fill your time?"

Ghoul shrugs and looks away.

Kobra shifts to sit on the floor and starts writing in the fine layer of grit that coats it. He says, "Let's start with the alphabet."

+++

Kobra's been working on a relay system for Dr. Death Defying for hours the night Fun Ghoul comes to him. He looks up when he hears footsteps in the garage and is surprised that Party's coming back instead of spending the night warming Sweet Assault's bed.

It's not Party, though, it's Fun Ghoul, and he stuffs his hands in his pockets and says, "Hey."

"Hey," Kobra says, stretching and pushing away from his workbench. "What's going on?"

"Nothing. Everybody's asleep."

Kobra nods and rolls a length of wire around a spool to keep it neat. He's not flying on anything, but it's been getting so hot during the day that he just sleeps through it and doesn't really move until the sun goes down.

"There's um," Kobra says, trying not to look at the way Ghoul's black hair curls at the ends, curving around his jaw. "There's these books that Party likes. They're kind of like the picture books we read to Baby Girl, only for adults. I've seen them sometimes at the market and I thought if you wanted some, I'd look tomorrow when we go."

Ghoul says, "Yeah, maybe." He walks close, in a slow, careful way that would make Kobra nervous if it were anybody else. When he gets to where Kobra's sitting, he kneels down and puts one hand on Kobra's knee. He says, "I'm probably going to leave soon. I don't want to go without paying my debts."

Kobra says, "You're leaving?" Then, "Pay your debts?"

"I don't have anything else to trade," Fun Ghoul whispers. He tips his head down so that his hair falls into his face. "Guys tell me that with the shape of my mouth and my hair like this, it's easy to pretend I'm a girl."

Kobra Kid shakes his head. "You don't owe me anything."

"I owe you my life. And you wasted those Beatitudes on me when you thought I'd just ghost any minute."

"So you can save my life next time," Kobra tells him. "Then we'll be square."

Fun Ghoul leans back and says, "Oh. You don't want--"

"I do," Kobra whispers before he knows he's going to. "Just, not as payment."

Ghoul says, "I, uh." He scratches his arm and looks away. "I've never actually, um. I've only ever done it to pay a debt."

Kobra says, "It's okay if you don't want to." He wants to touch the line of Ghoul's jaw, wants to taste his mouth and feel Ghoul's breath hot against his skin, but he can't bear the thought of it being something Ghoul owes him.

Ghoul looks up at him through his bangs and whispers, "I want to."

Kobra slides down so they're kneeling chest to chest. He touches Ghoul's mouth with his fingertips before leaning in for a kiss.

He remembers this. They haven't been in the zones long, not even a year, but life before seems so distant that most of it is a blur to him, now. He remembers this, though, remembers the feel of another person's mouth, remembers the way his blood thrums in his veins as he touches skin and feels the muscle and bone beneath.

He's seen Ghoul's body before, but not this way. He's seen Ghoul broken apart and bleeding. He's tended his wounds. That's not at all the same as touching him like this, as being allowed to run his hands and his mouth over every inch of skin.

He kisses the scars stretching across Ghoul's chest, kisses his sharp collarbones and his shoulders, kisses the tattoos trailing down his arm, kisses the track marks on the insides of both elbows. He doesn't ask because it doesn't matter, because anything that happened in the past is none of his business.

When he presses inside Ghoul's body, they're face to face, Ghoul's legs wrapped tight around him, head tipped back, baring his throat as he moans. Kobra kisses him there, bites and sucks, wanting to leave marks. He doesn't want Ghoul to leave him, to just walk away back into the dust and never think about him again. He doesn't want this to be like the anonymous, desperate sex he'd had in the underground that didn't mean anything but release and freedom.

In the quietest, darkest part of the night, they lie tangled together, listening to each other breathe. There had been candles, but they'd burned out long before. Kobra wants to find more, wants to light them so he can see Ghoul's face, see his body, so fucking perfect and beautiful, every part of it, even the scars. But that would mean getting out of bed, and he's not willing to break contact for even an instant. 

It's the first time he's been with someone whose name he knows. It's the first time he's been with someone he wants to wake up next to. Ghoul doesn't even know what he's given Kobra, thinks of his body as something to trade. Kobra doesn't know how to explain it to him, doesn't know how to tell him how much more than that this is. He wants to give Ghoul something back, though, a piece of himself, even if it's small. He says, "I turned seventeen last week."

Ghoul makes a soft, sleepy sound. "You didn't even tell me. Would have gotten you a present."

"This is a good present," Kobra whispers. He kisses Ghoul's temple. He says, "You're really leaving?"

Ghoul turns and burrows against him, slings one leg over Kobra's hip and whispers, "I could probably be persuaded to stay for a while."

A while isn't as much as Kobra wants, but it's more than he thought he'd get, so he doesn't argue.

+++

A while turns out to be three weeks.

The man who walks into the station has shaggy light blonde hair and a long beard just a few shades darker and tinged with red. He's carrying a duffle bag over one shoulder, and his hand's already on the butt of his zapper when he comes into sight.

He says, "Where's Frank?"

Kobra Kid doesn't move except to flick the strap off the top of his holster. He sees Sweet Assault moving very slowly towards Baby Girl, and to draw the guy's attention away from them, Kobra says, "I don't know anybody by that name."

The guy stares at Kobra and he's more than halfway to overdrive, Kobra can tell by his eyes. He's seen it before, that dangerous, faraway look that means somebody's close to just pulling out their gun and shooting anything that moves. Then the guy swings the duffle bag off his shoulder and lets it thump hard onto the closest table. He unzips it and tugs the sides down and fuck, it's a bomb, it's _five_ bombs. The crazy motherfucker's got five fucking bombs right there on the table, and Kobra doesn't know if he's got time to run.

"I want Frank back," the guy tells him. "I know you have him, and I want him back. Frankie's a good kid."

"I'm sure he is," Kobra says calmly. He hears Sweet Assault scrambling out of the station but he doesn't look to watch her go.

"I've got pipe bombs, mostly. Only one nitro, but I do good work. Even the pipes will take out three, four cars, depending on how you set 'em."

Kobra says, "Okay."

"It's good work!" the guy shouts.

"I can see that. I can see that it is. Four pipes and a nitro, fuck, that'll blow a crater half the size of Bat City."

The guy smiles at him. He says, "Yeah. We set one at the training center, blew that fucker into nothing. Fucking Drac bits raining from the sky."

Kobra tries not to imagine what that must have been like.

"Hey, Slaughter," Fun Ghoul says softly from the back door. "You scaring the shit out of my friends right now?"

"I came here to get you," Slaughter Pop says. "I came here to fucking--this is my best fucking work, Frankie, and if they don't want it in trade I'll just fucking take you back. They can't keep you. She's a fucking croaker, Frankie. She's a goddamn croaker and she can't fucking--"

"She saved my life," Fun Ghoul tells him. "And this guy right here? This is Kobra Kid. He knows how to fix you if you get a wound that starts to rot. He gave me Beatitudes to keep the pain away even when he thought for sure I was just going to ghost. They're not the kind of croakers that we're used to, okay?"

"A croaker's a croaker's a croaker," Slaughter Pop growls.

"Then she's not a croaker. How you been? Jet back from the underground, yet?"

He shakes his head. "Not yet. Come on. That fucking bushpig won't have time to get his zapper out of his holster if he reaches for it. We'll go and they can just take my work in trade and we're even." Slaughter Pop winces. "It's all I had. I'm sorry. You're worth more than four pipes and a nitro, Frankie."

Fun Ghoul smiles at him. "Thanks, Slaughter. You're worth more than a hundred pipes. Come on, let's put this out in the shed and I'll show you around."

"But I came here to rescue you."

"And that's why you're worth more than a million pipes. But I'm fine. I'm healing up and nobody's keeping me here." He tugs on the collar of his too-big shirt, pulls it down so Slaughter Pop can see the ugly scab just over his heart. "She knows how to take them out."

Slaughter Pop steps forward and leans in, looks at it for a moment, then reaches to touch it. "That just fucking proves she's a croaker."

"Maybe she was, once, but she's not anymore. None of us out here are what we used to be." He lets go of his collar and it slides back up to cover his chest, though it's stretched and uneven on the left side. "Come on, I'll show you where you can stow your gear."

Slaughter Pop zips up his bag of bombs and follows Fun Ghoul out the back. Kobra lets out a long, shaky breath and sits down just moments before his legs give out. He'd thought he was spatter for sure.

"What the fuck was that?" Party demands, leaning through the front door. "If he'd moved half a foot to the left, I would have had a clean shot."

"That was Slaughter Pop," Kobra says, rubbing his forehead. "Apparently, he thought we were keeping Fun Ghoul prisoner and he came to bargain for his freedom."

"With fucking bombs?"

"They're his best work. He wanted to trade."

Party Poison seems to think about that for a moment. "You could make a bomb if you wanted to, right?"

Kobra says, "No."

"But they're just wires and electronics, right? And you can already--"

Kobra says, "No," and leaves the diner without saying anything else. He'll ghost a drac if he has to, isn't squeamish about causing death if it means staying alive, but he can't imagine making a bomb. He can't imagine spending all the time he takes crafting antennas and radios and receivers on crafting something that's only purpose is to rip bodies apart.

He finds Ghoul and Slaughter Pop in the garage. Ghoul is saying, "If she took mine out, she can take yours, too."

Slaughter Pop looks up and gazes right at Kobra, a long, unblinking stare. He says, "Croaker."

Ghoul sighs and says, "He's not. He's my age, Slaughter, when the fuck would he have had time to become a croaker?"

Slaughter Pop doesn't look convinced. He says, "We need to talk."

Ghoul sits down on a crate full of broken receivers and amplifiers and radios that Kobra mines for parts. "So talk."

Slaughter Pop looks at Kobra, then back at Ghoul.

"He can hear anything you've got to say to me."

Slaughter Pop sets his jaw.

"It's cool," Kobra tells them. He wants to make sure Sweet Assault knows they're not under imminent threat of being blown up, anyway.

He finds her and Party Poison in their room. Sweets is holding tight to Baby Girl and rubbing her back, not letting go even when Baby Girl starts to squirm.

"Who the fuck is he?" Party asks.

"A friend of Fun Ghoul's." It's pretty much all Kobra knows. "Back when he first got here, when we didn't know if he'd make it, he told me that if he ghosted, he wanted me to get a message to Slaughter Pop, to let him know what happened. I think he's got the same thing Ghoul had, whatever you took out of his chest under the tattoo. He doesn't seem to want you to take it out, though. I don't think he likes doctors very much."

He doesn't know why that makes tears well up in Sweet Assault's eyes or why it makes Party sit down next to her and put his arm around her shoulders.

Baby Girl finally manages to squirm out of Sweet's lap and Kobra scoops her up once she toddles his way. She starts to fuss and presses her hand hard against his chest, so Kobra puts her down again saying, "Okay, okay. You want to go read books?"

"No," Baby Girl says. "Apple?"

"I don't have any apples, Baby Girl."

"There's an orange in the diner," Party tells him. "It's tucked in with the rest of the rations."

Baby Girl tries to eat the peel as soon as Kobra gets enough of it off to fall to the table. "Don't eat that," he says, trying to take it out of her mouth. She shoves his hand away and chews, then makes a face and pushes the peel out of her mouth with her tongue, letting it fall half-chewed to the table, bits of it stuck to her chin.

"I told you not to," Kobra says, wiping the bits of peel off her chin with his hand. "The outside's yucky, we don't eat that part. We eat this part." He separates a section and hands it to her. She takes it but doesn't eat it, just looks at it suspiciously.

"Like this," he says, taking a bite of the next section. "The outside's yucky, but the inside's good."

It is good, the sweetest orange he thinks he's ever tasted. He might have tasted better back when he lived in Battery City, but he doesn't ever remember enjoying anything. In the zones, they use drugs as tools to help them survive, but in Battery City the drugs he'd been given had been designed to keep him from feeling anything. They weren't supposed to feel joy or sorrow or pain or delight. Maybe that's why it thrills him so much to watch the expression on Baby Girl's face change as she tastes her first bite of orange and why he so willingly gives her section after section, not even wanting to keep any for himself.

Once the orange is gone, she crawls down onto the floor and cradles her doll in her arms, pretending to feed it. Kobra switches booths to where he's got a Zenith Trans-Oceanic all laid out so he can replace the old selenium rectifier with silicone diodes. It's slow going since the diodes are so small; he doesn't want to interrupt Ghoul and Slaughter's conversation to get his magnifying glass out of the garage.

He doesn't look up when he hears footsteps, even though he recognizes them as Fun Ghoul's. He knows the sound of Fun Ghoul's footsteps and he can tell if Ghoul's asleep or awake just by the way he breathes. When Fun Ghoul brushes his nose against Kobra's shoulder in bed, he can tell the difference between the brush that means Ghoul's sleepy and affectionate and the brush that means he wants more. He knows the way Ghoul holds his breath just before he comes and he knows just how to slide his fingers down Ghoul's side to make him shriek with laughter and he doesn't look up when Ghoul walks into the diner because he knows what Ghoul's going to say before he says it.

"Hey," Fun Ghoul says softly.

"Hey," Kobra says without looking up. He can't remember what he's doing, what step he's on in attaching the diodes, but he pretends that he's hard at work.

"Slaughter thinks our friend Jet is probably in trouble," Fun Ghoul tells him. "He needs our help, so I'm going to go."

Kobra says, "Okay."

"I'm. I'm taking off as soon as I pack up my gear."

Kobra looks up at him for a split second, then looks back down at the radio. He says, "All right."

Ghoul doesn't say anything. He's waiting, Kobra knows, but there's nothing else Kobra can give him. He doesn't look back up.

"What the fuck is your problem?" Ghoul demands.

Kobra shrugs and traces his finger over the insides of the old radio. "I don't have a problem."

"I'm taking off right now and you're not even going to say goodbye?"

Kobra says, "So what? Fucking go." He wants to sound angry, and he does until his voice breaks on the last word.

Ghoul steps up onto the bench and sits on the table. He cups Kobra's cheek in his hand. "Are you sad that I'm leaving?"

Kobra whispers, "Of course I am." He can't say it any louder or he'll start to cry.

Fun Ghoul takes a shaky breath. He leans down and kisses Kobra's temple, then nuzzles against his hair. He says, "I'll be back." He sounds as close to tears as Kobra feels.

"You don't have to--"

"Nobody ever cared if I stayed before."

Kobra tips his head up and kisses Ghoul hard, fists his hands in Ghoul's long, black hair and tries to make him understand. Kobra's never had anybody of his own before. Kobra's never cared if anybody stayed. Not even leaving his old life and his old name and the people who had been his parents had hurt as much as the thought of never seeing Ghoul again.

"Frankie!" Slaughter Pop calls from outside the front door. "We're losing daylight."

Ghoul breaks the kiss and breathes against Kobra's mouth for a moment before he says, "Tomorrow."

Kobra hears Slaughter Pop enter the diner, but he doesn't turn to look.

"You're coming back this way tomorrow, anyway," Ghoul says. "I'll be ready. Tomorrow."

Slaughter Pop's voice is surprisingly gentle when he says, "Yeah. Okay, Frankie. Tomorrow."

Touching Ghoul always makes him feel like he's on a space trip, like he's a mile past the ionosphere with no stop in sight. His blood hums like he's running on Dulces and he's as giddy and skin-sensitive as he gets on Alegrias and the serenity afterwards is more perfect than Placidas, and it's just because of Ghoul. It's just touching Ghoul's body and being touched by him, hearing his moans and feeling the scrape of his teeth and curling up with their fingers intertwined.

Kobra knows he's going to ache the next day, but he doesn't mind. He touches Ghoul's face and smiles stupidly at him as both of them catch their breath, sweat drying on their overheated skin. It's only halfway through the night. They've still got hours to go.

The first time had been frantic, all desperate kisses and clinging hands and Ghoul biting down on Kobra's shoulder hard enough that he could hardly bear it. _He did it to mark me,_ Kobra had thought afterwards as he'd held Ghoul's trembling body. The sun was just starting to set and Kobra only pulled away long enough to set up the lanterns.

They've come together and stopped for rest again and again. The lanterns are burning low. Ghoul takes long drinks of water, then offers the cup to Kobra, who shakes his head. His skin is overstimulated, but he only pulls Ghoul closer when he lies back down.

Ghoul rests his head on Kobra's chest and slides his fingers back and forth along his ribs. Kobra uses his fingers to trace the knobs of Ghoul's spine. He can feel the muscle in the back of his right thigh starting to tighten; he's pulled it somehow and it's going to ache in the morning. He smiles happily and tilts his head so he can press a kiss to Fun Ghoul's hair.

Ghoul says, "I think I had a family once."

Kobra doesn't say anything, but he does lay his hand between Ghoul's shoulder blades, like somehow he can protect him from the past.

"I think my father's name was Frank. That's the name I gave Slaughter when he found me because I didn't have one of my own."

Ghoul pulls away and sits up and Kobra lets him. He doesn't go far. He sits so close that they're still touching and he looks down at his hands, but they're resting on Kobra's hip.

"I feel like I had a family once, like I had parents and a life before BLI, but I don't really remember." He clears his throat. "We were always on something in the center. I don't know why. Maybe we were an experiment. Maybe we were just a game, something to amuse them. The croakers were always pumping us full of drugs and sometimes it made us sick and sometimes it made us go rabid and sometimes it was the best fucking space trip you can imagine. And then they dumped us out in Zone 6 and surrounded us with limeade and I was the only one who didn't die."

Kobra wants to take that away and make it untrue, but all he can do is curl around Ghoul and pull him close and listen to the sound of his breath. He places his hand gently over Ghoul's heart, over the scar where the barcode had been.

"Slaughter found me and took me in because he didn't die, either. He says seven of them lived from his group, but most of them were in permanent overdrive and he and Jet Star are the only two I've ever met. I would have died without them even though the limeade didn't kill me. I would have starved or maybe just laid down to die if they hadn't taken me in. If Jet's in trouble, I have to go."

"I know you do."

"It won't be long. I'll be back."

"You don’t have to--"

"Shut the fuck up," Ghoul says. He kisses Kobra hard and tugs on his hair. "I'm coming back here. I'm coming back to you."

Kobra says, "You'd better."

"Before you know it, I'll be back. You'll look up one day and there'll be a cloud of dust on the horizon and that'll be me hauling ass back to you, okay?"

Kobra says, "Okay," and slides his hands over Ghoul's skin. He only has a few more hours and he needs to make them count.

After Fun Ghoul takes off the next morning, Kobra can still feel the things he's left behind. He's left bruises all over Kobra's skin and a bite blooming dark purple on his shoulder. He's left something deep inside Kobra's chest, too, something small and shimmering with hope. When Kobra slides into his booth, the tiny thing in his chest bursts and overflows and he puts his fingers to the words Ghoul had carved into the wall for him to see: inside a ragged heart, it says, "Ghoul + Kobra for ever."

"So why are those little things better than what came with the radio to start with?" Party asks, sliding into the booth across from him.

Kobra looks down at the old Zenith and says, "Selenium rectifiers are great until they're not. Once they start forward resistance, the voltage drop doesn't stop. They'll resist until catastrophic failure, which I know you've smelled. That stink that happens? That's the selenium giving off those fumes."

"Huh," says Party. He picks up one of the silicone diodes on the tip of his finger. "How does this replace that?"

Kobra knows he doesn't actually care, but he also knows Party's giving him something to think about other than Fun Ghoul headed away from him and towards the Battery City underground. He says, "Well, to start with, this is like a check valve. That's what rectifiers do, they turn alternating current into direct current."

"That means it can only flow one way, right?" Party asks. "Why does that matter?"

Kobra nods. "That's how radios work. Say Dr. Death's transmitting, that means he's sending out electromagnetic waves through the air and Dr. D's transmitter is modulating that wave, in this case the amplitude, the strength."

"Why not the frequency?" Party asks. "The radio in Batt City was frequency modulated, right?"

"Yeah," Kobra says. "That works better in cities. AM signals are easily fucked up by things like tall buildings or things that give off their own electrical interference. Fluorescent lights, power lines, even toaster ovens, they all give off electromagnetic interference. Out here, though, the waves just fly through the air with nothing in their way, and then they hit the antenna. The antenna turns the electromagnetic waves into alternating currents, switching direction thousands of times per second, and then that," Mikey gestures to the diode on the tip of Party's finger, "that takes that AC and gives us its envelope, um. It's like this, right?" He draws a squiggle in the dust on the table. "That's the signal, and this?" He draws a line over the squiggle, connecting every curve on top. "This is the envelope, what goes over it. It's a sound wave, see?"

Party squints at it then tips his head to the side. Suddenly he says, "Oh! Oh, that's, yeah. I remember that. We learned that." He looks up at Kobra and grins. "Who knew anything BLI teaches kids could actually be useful?" He raises the little diode up and squints at it. "So this tiny little thing does the same thing whatever you're taking out of the radio did, but it does it without burning out and creating toxic fumes."

"Yeah," Kobra says.

"I just say it's magic," Sweet Assault says with a grin. She slides into the booth next to Kobra and looks over his shoulder. "When Baby Girl asks me how voices come through the radio, I'm just going to tell her it's magic."

"You are not," says Kobra. "You're going to send her over to me and I'll show her how to make her own."

"How old were you when you made that first one?" Party asks softly. "The one with all the wire wound around that, what was it? A soup can?"

"Toilet paper roll," Kobra says, smiling at the memory.

"You could barely hear it," Party says with a laugh. "I didn't know what the hell it was for the longest time, just one of his experiments. Our whole room was filled with them -- a lightbulb made out of a glass jar and a pie tin, a needle floating in a bowl of water, all this weird stuff that meant nothing to me. And then one night it was so quiet, nobody home but me, and I heard voices. I had to put my head right next to it and even then I could barely hear it, but there were voices coming from it, saying things I'd never heard before, saying come to the underground, saying stop taking your pills, saying art is the weapon."

Sweets kisses Kobra's cheek. "Thank you," she says.

"For what?"

"For planting the seed."

Kobra'd never thought about it like that before, but maybe he hadn't just followed Party out of Bat City. Maybe he'd been the one to give Party a push, even though he hadn't known what he'd been doing at the time. He'd made them both headphones so they could hear it louder and they'd listened to that crystal radio every night for years. It would go silent for weeks at a time, but still, at least one of them was always listening, and finally they'd stopped taking their pills. Finally they'd come to the underground. Finally they'd learned what it meant to be free.

Kobra reaches out and touches the words carved into the wall again. He taught Fun Ghoul that, how to make words out of letters, and Fun Ghoul left words there for him to see, to remind him, as if he could ever forget. He darts a glance up at the horizon, but the dust is just the evidence of Fun Ghoul and Slaughter Pop's departure, not the dust cloud bringing Ghoul back home.

Kobra rolls his shoulders and looks back at the radio, starts telling Sweets and Party why the crystal radio had been so quiet and how to connect an amplifier to a receiver.

+++

Sweet Assault gets ghosted three weeks later. She doesn't even get ghosted by Dracs or Crows, just by bastard zonerunners who want her bike and her boots and her backpack full of pills.

The build a pyre for her right there in the desert and Party stands close enough for it to singe his hair. Kobra pulls him back as the flames crackle and rise and Party lets him, but only a few steps. There are already blisters rising on one of his bare arms.

Baby Girl's fussy and tense. She doesn't know what's happening and Kobra doesn't know how to tell her and when she starts to cry and ask for her mama, Kobra just cries with her and says over and over again that he's sorry.

Party doesn't get out of bed the next day. Baby Girl's taking a nap and Kobra doesn't remember the last time he slept and Party's just lying there with his face to the wall, crying silently. Kobra had known that Party liked Sweet Assault, but he hadn't known that he'd loved her, not until then.

It's just the two of them to take care of Baby Girl, now, and the thought is terrifying. It hadn't been scary at all when Sweet Assault had still been alive. Kobra had never thought of himself as responsible for another life, even though he'd slowly started taking care of Baby Girl without even realizing it.

They don't have to take care of her. Nobody would fault them for giving her to the Blind Sisters at the mill to be raised in the faith, nobody would fault them if they found her a place with a family on the way out of the Zones. Nobody would say a word if they turned her in to one of the amnesty children's homes run by BLI. She's nothing to them, after all, just the daughter of a woman whose bed Party used to warm.

She's theirs, though. She belongs to them as much as they belong to each other, as much as she'd belonged to Sweets, as much as Kobra belongs to Ghoul. She's theirs and Kobra realizes for the first time that he doesn't even know how old she is. He doesn't know if Sweets ever gave her a name. They call her Baby Girl because she's not old enough to choose a name for herself, but even in the Zones, parents give their children names to be kept secret.

Kobra Kid remembers the name his parents gave him, remembers the name they gave Party Poison. He knows Fun Ghoul's name, though he suspects that anyone who spends enough time around Slaughter Pop knows it, too.

He sits on the edge of the bed Party and Sweets used to share and his body is so weary. He feels like he's coming down out of high orbit, though he hasn't had a pill in days. "What's her name?" he asks softly. "Baby Girl. Did Sweets ever tell you her name?"

"Grace." Party's voice is cracked and thick with tears.

"Grace," Kobra says, looking at Baby Girl asleep on her cot. He tucks the name down safely in his chest, next to his and Party's and Ghoul's. Then he unlaces his boots and tugs them off before stretching out on the bed and curling around Party from behind. It's cold comfort, he knows, knows he can't ease Party's pain, but at least he can let him know he's not alone.

When Kobra finally sleeps, he doesn't dream.

+++

Party drags the shell of the Trans Am into the garage and cleans all the dust off it. He barters for parts at every market, and one morning Kobra wakes up with a start at the sound of the engine actually running, Party behind the wheel laughing and shouting with joy. He paints it silver with a black widow spider on the hood and when they get it running well enough to take it into the desert, Party floors it and Baby Girl stands up on Kobra's lap to feel the wind on her face.

She's a little girl, now, not a baby anymore, and Kobra hadn't even noticed it happening. She can put on her own clothes and climb the stairs in the garage without falling. She asks Kobra why the sky is blue, though she doesn't seem to really understand what he means by molecules or atmosphere or light scattering.

He spends half a moon's turn out at the mill, collecting the supplies for a giant water filtration system and then assembling it for the Blind Sisters. When he gets back to the station, Baby Girl runs from him and hides and Party tells him she thought he'd left the same way her mom had and Party just hadn't had the heart to tell her.

She starts talking to him again the next day, though, and makes him take her out shooting so she can show off how good she's getting with the blaster. He can tell that Party had spent a lot of time teaching her while he was gone because she shoots just like he does, careful and quick and very precise. She laughs at how sloppy Kobra is with his blaster and he gives Party a quick wink so he doesn't worry that maybe Kobra really is that out of practice.

When he goes to sleep at night, he sleeps on the right side of the mattress instead of in the center like he used to. Sometimes he reaches out and touches nothing at all, just the space where Fun Ghoul's supposed to be. Sometimes he lies awake and worries, then he refuses to let himself worry, refuses to think about all the things that could have happened since Ghoul's been away, refuses to think about all the things that could keep them apart forever.

In the mornings he eats whatever Party puts in front of him and works on the amplifier he's promised Dr. Death Defying. It's going to be a lattice tower, he thinks, which isn't the most practical design, but it will up the strength of the transmissions tenfold. It won't be portable, it'll be too big and he'll probably have to anchor it into the ground with concrete, but he can make more than one. The only limit to the number of towers he makes is the availability of steel, and he can scavenge most of what he needs.

Baby Girl climbs up onto the bench next to him and reads her book. She still doesn't know most of the words, but she likes to pretend. She reads it out loud, sometimes getting the lines right, sometimes just making them up, and Kobra spares her a warm smile before he turns back to the plans he's sketching. After a while he's gotten the point where he just needs to start building prototypes and seeing if they work the way he expects them to. He picks at the remains of the Power Pup he'd had for breakfast and listens to Baby Girl reading to her doll. He gazes out the window and waits to see dust on the horizon.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [First Drafts and Unfinished Snippets](https://archiveofourown.org/works/567678) by [Sena](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sena/pseuds/Sena)




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